SEE NL 36

Halina Reijn’s Instinct: Locarno, Toronto, London and NFF opener Carice on Reijn, Thrones and Red Light Doreen Boonekamp on ten years at the Film Fund Eye on Tarkovsky Previews of Cinekid and Holland Film Meeting

Issue #36 September 2019 Locarno / Venice / TIFF / NFF issue

Index 6-9 Instinctive director Halina Reijn’s debut Instinct world-premiered at Locarno, was selected for TIFF and London, and now opens the Netherlands Film Festival 10-11 A piece of Carice Dutch icon Carice van Houten discusses Instinct, her friendship with Halina Reijn and their new production company Man Up 12-13 Girl talk Stefanie Kolk was back at Locarno with her latest short film Eyes on the Road, about three girls in a car 14-15 Name of the father Isabel Lamberti’s short documentary Father is a touching account of a reunion between a man and his estranged son 16-17 Buried in the past Sergei Loznitsa explores the cult of personality in State Funeral, using archive of Stalin’s funeral

34-35 Trigger happy Joost van Hezik’s tragi-comic psycho-noir Boy Meets Gun world premieres at Busan 36-37 Return of HFM Assessing the yearly interface between the Dutch production industry and the international co-pro, sales and distribution sectors 38-39 The kids are alright Previewing Cinekid for Professionals 2019 40-41 Kaboom time for toons The Netherlands has a new animation festival, based in Utrecht and Amsterdam and kicking off November 9 42-43 Eye on a Russian icon The latest Eye exhibition focuses on a giant of 20th Century world cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky 44 Back cover Rutger Hauer

18-21 Closing the gap Five new projects with strong Dutch interest were presented at the Venice Gap-Financing Market in 2019 22-25 A decade of change Outgoing Film Fund chief Doreen Boonekamp reflects on her past ten years in charge 26-27 Role reversal Human Nature, the latest animated short from Sverre Fredriksen world-premiered at TIFF 2019 28-29 Return of the king After the success of King of the Belgians Woodworth and Brosens are back with the sequel The Barefoot Emperor 30-31 Camera, lights, A’dam A significant part of TIFF selection The Goldfinch, based on the Donna Tartt novel, was shot in Amsterdam 32-33 So long, farewell… Marten Rabarts is leaving Eye International to head up the New Zealand International Film Festival

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COLOPHON See NL is published four times per year by Eye International and The Netherlands Film Fund and is distributed to international film professionals.

Editors in chief: Marten Rabarts, (Eye), Jonathan Mees (Netherlands Film Fund) Executive editor: Nick Cunningham Contributor: Geoffrey Macnab Concept & Design: Lava.nl Layout: def., Amsterdam Printing: mediaLiaison Printed on FSC paper © All rights reserved: The Netherlands Film Fund and Eye International 2019 CONTACT Sandra den Hamer CEO Eye E sandradenhamer@eyefilm.nl Marten Rabarts Head of Eye International E martenrabarts@eyefilm.nl Eye International PO BOX 74782 1070 BT Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 758 2375 W www.eyefilm.nl Doreen Boonekamp CEO Netherlands Film Fund E d.boonekamp@filmfonds.nl Jonathan Mees Communications Netherlands Film Fund E j.mees@filmfonds.nl Netherlands Film Fund Pijnackerstraat 5 1072 JS Amsterdam The Netherlands T +31 20 570 7676 W www.filmfund.nl

© Family Affair Films

ISSN: 2589-3521

Human Nature

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Sverre Fredriksen page 26

Cover: Instinct Halina Reijn © Kris Dewitte See page 6

State Funeral

Sergei Loznitsa See page 16

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The Barefoot Emperor

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Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens See page 28

Instinctive director © Amrita Panday

Halina Reijn

Halina Reijn’s feature debut Instinct world-premiered in Locarno, screened in Toronto, is selected for London and will open the 2019 Netherlands Film Festi­ val. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

It was always part of the plan. When Halina Reijn was growing up, her childhood ambition was to become an actress… and a director as well.

Reijn has had a glittering career on stage and screen in the Netherlands, winning numerous awards in the process. She starred in films made by the great and the good of Dutch filmmaking talent, such as Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, Alex van Warmerdam’s Grimm and Tamar van den Dop’s Blind. She has written books and screenplays. She is known as the muse of the renowned Belgian theatre director, Ivo van Hove, touring the world in plays that he has staged. She starred opposite Jude Law in his adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s seamy, noirish Obsession (1943), itself inspired by James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and she gave grand­ stand performances in Van Hove’s productions of Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine and The Fountainhead.

Now, Reijn has made her feature film directorial debut. Instinct (which picked up the Variety Piazza Grande Award at Locarno as well as a Special Mention – Best First Feature) is based on an idea that the director herself had. It is about an experienced female prison psychologist (Carice van Houten) who begins an affair with a patient/ inmate (Marwan Kenzari) who is locked up for crimes of sexual violence. A cosy chamber piece this certainly isn’t.

“I was annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t make up everything myself,” Reijn recalls of herself as a kid who loved performing but also wanted to call the shots. If some­ body else was telling her what to do, she adds, she would feel like a “circus animal.”

Yet as her career progressed, Reijn could see more clearly how her considerable talents were an essential component within artistic collaborations. She worked often with directors like Van Hove (with whom she has collaborated for 20 years and to whom she gives complete control). If she believed in them, she found it would be exhilarating to help them realise their visions. “I am very good at totally surrendering to a director and really becoming clay in his hands. I don’t ask questions. I just… feel. I go into his heart or brain or whatever and I completely mould to his being.” Nonetheless, Reijn always had the hankering to “create something myself.”

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The idea of a professional woman choosing to having an affair with a known rapist (“sex with a psychopath” as Reijn puts it) might sound like something out of a late night thriller, but Instinct is based on true stories. Reijn had the idea for the film after watching a documentary on love affairs conducted in prison. One of the affairs involved a sexual offender and his psychiatrist. “I was totally intrigued by the question of how you can fall for someone like that when you know better than any other person – because you’re trained to know – what the traps are and how manipulative these people are.”

No, Reijn never considered playing the role of the psychologist herself.

That would have been biting off far too much given that she hadn’t directed a feature before. Instead, she cast her close friend Carice van Houten, whom she has known since the start of her professional acting career and with whom she runs the production company Man Up, dedicated to creating female stories from a female perspective.

Intriguingly, Reijn suggests that there is a lot of her own personality in the self-destructive prison psychiatrist who embarks so recklessly on the affair. “Almost all the parts I did with Ivo are themed around this masochism, selfdestruction, sexuality and power,” she says.

In directing Instinct, Reijn drew closely on her experiences

Opening film: Netherlands Film Festival

Halina Reijn

Toronto International Film Festival 2019

“Directing is about your soul but at the same time it is about managing a team”

© Kris Dewitte

Instinct

Instinct Director: Halina Reijn Scriptwriters: Esther Gerritsen, Halina Reijn Production: Topkapi Films (NL) - Frans van Gestel, Arnold Heslenfeld, Laurette Schillings Co-production: Man Up (NL), BNN-VARA (NL) Sales: Films Boutique 7

Instinct

Halina Reijn

© Kris Dewitte

“Halina is a creator.

She is a storyteller”

Instinct Director: Halina Reijn Scriptwriters: Esther Gerritsen, Halina Reijn Production: Topkapi Films (NL) - Frans van Gestel, Arnold Heslenfeld, Laurette Schillings Co-production: Man Up (NL), BNN-VARA (NL) Sales: Films Boutique 8

Instinctive director Continued from page 7

working with Van Hove. “He was there all the time, on my shoulder as it were. He doesn’t know this but he was so close to me while I was directing it. Carice has never worked with him but knows him so well through my connection with him. We both felt he was there constantly, like a ghost, watching us and being with us. Also, the themes of this film – power and sexuality – are so close to him.”

Yes, Reijn acknowledges, directing is stressful – but it isn’t nearly as demanding as acting. She likens the pressure of acting to the scrutiny her boyfriend Daniël de Ridder, a former professional footballer, faced every time he played. She faced a similar level of expectation.

When her producer Frans van Gestel of Topkapi Films warned her that she would find directing exhausting, she told him it was “nothing like being on stage!”

“If you have a sports career or are a ballerina, there comes a time when you have to stop because of age,” she says. “There are, of course, actors who continue until they die and I am, of course, jealous of them, but for me acting is too heavy.”

“It is such a burden, so intense, so emotional… Directing is about your soul but at the same time, it is about managing a team. It is much more technical. You can stand there with your big coat on and your boots, your hair looks horrible, you have pimples everywhere and you can still be directing. As an actress, if

you don’t feel good or you don’t look right, it will affect you – and you are irreplaceable. Everybody is looking at you.”

Reijn was meticulous in her pre­ paration for Instinct. After all, she was very conscious that her two leads, Van Houten and Kenzari, are both major movie stars. One had been in Game of Thrones, the other in Disney’s Aladdin. They knew as much about filmmaking as she did and she wanted to “really be on their level, and then on a higher level to help and guide them through this process.”

Early in the rehearsal period, following the example of Ivo van Hove, she gathered all the actors and crew members into a room together and told them why she was making the film and why it mattered so much to her. This engendered a sense of collective responsibility and involvement.

Producer Frans van Gestel of Topkapi Films pays tribute to Reijn’s professionalism. He deliberately made the film, supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, as 100% Dutch, not a co-production. That meant it was easier and quicker to finance and that there was less pressure on the director. She consequently describes the 23 days of shooting in Bijlmer Bajes (a famous Amsterdam prison now closed down) as “the happiest days of my life.”

Topkapi had been working with Reijn on various projects before

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Instinct was greenlit. When it became apparent this was going to be her debut feature as director, the Topkapi boss was determined to provide her with the most secure environment in which to make the movie. “She was a team player.

By the time we were in financing, I had to find her the best possible crew. She trusted me… it worked out perfectly well. We had a great team. She is into the creative process of building stories and building characters. On top of that, she is really smart. She learns fast.”

“Halina didn’t feel to me at all like an actress who, in a very forced way, wanted to be a director,” Van Gestel continues. “She is a creator. She is a storyteller. And she is extremely aware of development and of the whole process of filmmaking.”

Having just completed Instinct, Reijn and Van Houten are already working on a TV series together, made through their Man Up production company. Red Light is about prostitution and human trafficking. Van Houten plays a prostitute trying to escape her pimp. Reijn is a wealthy, pampered opera singer, obsessed with having a baby. The third character is a police detective played by Belgian actress Maaike Neuville. The three women’s lives overlap in many intriguing ways. “Basically, it’s about three women trapped in a situation they want to get out of,” Reijn concludes.

A piece of Carice Carice van Houten still remembers vividly her first meetings with fellow thespturned-filmmaker Halina Reijn who directs her in new film Instinct, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

They were both auditioning for drama schools and “kept seeing each other along the way.” Reijn made a throwaway remark to the future Game of Thrones star.

“She said that she liked my boots.”

It was a compliment that marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship which has lasted ever since.

Both actresses felt like “outsiders” at their drama schools because they were being hired professionally while still studying. Van Houten illustrates the strength of their friendship (which would eventually evolve into a sound business partnership) by pointing to parallels in “what we were going through, our backgrounds and even the core of our beings.”

Since then, the pair have had illustrious careers. Van Houten starred in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (in which Reijn also played a significant role) and achieved huge international fame (as well as an Emmy nomination) as Melisandre the Red Priestess in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Reijn is one of the Netherlands’ best known stage actresses. They now have a pro­ duction company together, Man Up, through which Instinct was made.

Thanks to Game of Thrones, Van Houten is a full blown star. Not that she always welcomes the attention that comes with her celebrity. She calls herself a “house mouse” and says she relishes her family (she has

“We couldn’t always see the difference between the psychiatrists and the criminal clients,” Van Houten recalls a young child with Australian star Guy Pearce whom she met on the set of Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone) and privacy. “Yes, people do recognise me but, at the same time, Holland is quite a sober country, even though we have paparazzi. It’s not as bad as England.”

Is it a relief that Game of Thrones is over? “You can’t let things drag on forever,” she replies. “It was a huge success, a phenomenon and I was grateful I was part of it… but all good things come to an end.”

In Instinct, Van Houten plays a prison psychiatrist who has an affair with an inmate (Marwan Kenzari) with a history of sexual violence against women. While co-developing the film with Reijn, Van Houten did the research, visiting prisons and observing psychiatrists and inmates. “We couldn’t always see the difference between the psychiatrists and the criminal clients,” she recalls. “The fact that

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somebody is a therapist, it means yes, they’ve been tested and they are supposed to be quite sane but, as we all know, that is not always the case. We are also telling a story about a woman at a particular time in her life… this is the moment when she is vulnerable to this situation.”

Van Houten continues to be fearless in her choice of roles, willing and ready to play characters with dark sides, both uncompromising and fragile. Nonetheless, she points out that there is more to her repertoire than the troubled, tragic figures she has portrayed in films like Black Book, Brimstone, Instinct and her current series Red Light, made by Man Up in which she and Reijn play two very different women who, connected by the Red Light world, develop an unexpected alliance.

“I love drama, I really do, but at the same time I love light material. A lot of my work here in the Netherlands has been quite comedic… people [abroad] don’t associate that sort of lightness with me.”

So, Man Up as a company name?

Isn’t that a touch ironic? “It’s a bit of a joke in fact. We thought it was a fun name. Before the whole MeToo movement, we started it. Man Up came from us feeling like circus bears in our profession. We were a bit fed up being told what to do.

We felt that we were too insecure about ourselves and that we were avoiding conflict in order to keep the harmony. So we said, OK, we have to Man Up!”

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© Janey van Ierland

Leopards of Tomorrow Competition

Eyes on the Road

Eyes on the Road Director & script: Stefanie Kolk Production:Â New Amsterdam Film Company - Miel van Welzen, Sander Verdonk, Julius Ponten Sales: Varicoloured

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Stefanie Kolk

Stefanie Kolk

© Angelique van Woerkom

Girl talk

Locarno favourite Stefanie Kolk presented her latest short Eyes on the Road, about three girls in a car returning from a festival, at Switzerland’s leading lakeside event. The director speaks with Nick Cunningham.

As three young Dutch women drive back from a festival along an unspecified length of road, the conversation ebbs and flows between matters both serious and mundane. Like her previous film Harbour, also selected for Locarno and in which two workers must decide what to do when they see a dead body in the North Sea, much of the film’s fascination lies in how the characters on screen are forced to react to profound events offscreen. But chat along a six-hour car journey will invariably drift to cover a panoply of verbal banalities, expressed with varying degrees of articulacy, in the process allowing director Stefanie Kolk to explore the human condition, warts and all.

The film is supported through the Film Fund shorts scheme.

“When I was writing the film the image crept into my mind of a conversation as going down a river

in a small boat. You can only go forward and never go back,” Kolk comments. “Once something has been said it cannot be taken back.

Then people react to what is said and that takes you down a new branch of the river. And then some­ body else reacts on that, and so I had this idea of this whole conversation between friends eventually being like a river delta.

What is interesting is the inter­ change between moments. There is

“I feel it is essential to trust your audience to use their imagination to expand the story beyond its confines” a serious and empathetic moment, and then suddenly they are fighting over a bag of crisps.”

She adds: “This interchange is exemplary for me, how people are pulled between superficiality and depth, between empathy and narcissism. I find this oddly moving.

Making a lame joke about some­ thing dark, or after an empathetic moment, is not something you often see in films, but this inter­ change is really part of what makes us human… Maybe empathy can only exist because we’re all so superficial.”

The women in the car continually bicker and disagree, but it is obvious that they are close friends who love each other and are pre­

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pared to overlook each other’s short-term inadequacies. The “lame joke” may be used to drive the narrative in another film but in Eyes on the Road it is swatted away and soon forgotten. There is fallout but it is mild and manageable.

“The car is a confined space. Maybe you say something stupid, but you are forgiven for it. In public we would kill each other, but inside the car there is a kind of safety that I find interesting,” underlines Kolk.

“The car also provides unity. I feel that short films are stronger when there is some form of unity. For feature films I prefer bigger stories with different settings and spatial freedom. Either way I feel it is essential to trust your audience to use their imagination to expand the story beyond its confines.”

Even though all three roles are played flawlessly, it is the character of Alex, who sits in the back, who is the most captivating. Played by newcomer Frida Bernhard, she continually radiates both intelligence and an innate sense of scepticism.

(Resembling a young Rifka Lodeizen, she was drafted in to portray Rifka’s younger self in the Dutch TV series Judas.)

“I like characters who have a little bit of sarcasm in the way they relate to things, who look at things with a sense of detached amusement.

I like these characters because they are also a little lonely. Their lone­ liness moves me,” ends Kolk.

Leopards of Tomorrow Competition

Father (Vader)

Father (Vader) Director & script: Isabel Lamberti Production: IJswater Films (NL) Co-production: KRO-NCRV (NL) Sales: IJswater Films 14

Isabel Lamberti

Name of the father Isabel Lamberti

Isabel Lamberti’s short doc Father, is a touching account of a reunion between a man and his estranged son.

Jacinto has the bald head and impressive musculature of a circus strongman. His work is physical – he spray-paints enormous pieces of machinery which are suspended metres above his head – and he returns from work every day to be massaged and comforted by his sensitive and caring girlfriend, Alia.

He has obviously had a difficult past that he would prefer to forget, one which is not specifically described by the filmmaker. But he also has a 16-year old son (Shakur) whom he has not seen in years and with whom he decides to go away for a few days by the sea-side. While away, all they do is pretty much nothing. Both are happy simply to hang out and to allow time together to heal whatever caused their initial estrangement. The film was realized through the Teledoc Campus scheme with Film Fund support.

“I really like that the film is about a father and a son. Maybe because, and I’m generalizing now, men are thought to be more reluctant to talk

about feelings and emotions.

The father and son depicted in this film don’t talk with each other about their past, or dwell on their feelings. They have their own ways to come closer to one another.”

Lamberti met Jacinto on a river cruise through Amsterdam. He was working the boats and was very friendly and approachable. When she heard about his past and the existence of a son in care she sensed

…the bald head and impressive musculature of a circus strongman the reunion would be excellent material for a short documentary.

While Jacinto was keen to co-operate from the start, as was Alia, the people that needed convincing were the social services. “He was a minor and under child protection, so we had to work a lot to persuade them that this was not going to be ‘reportage, ugly, sensational’.

That was never the film this was going to be.”

Lamberti stresses how she was fascinated by the sense of “duality” evident within the father. “On the one hand, when you first see him, he is an impressive guy and maybe even intimidating. His appearence suggests somebody you don’t want to mess with. On the other hand, he was very open and vulnerable to me.

It became clear really fast that he carries a lot of pain with him.”

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“Like his son, he was brought up in a foster home, in Germany,” she continues. “Being black in post-War Germany, and later on in Amster­ dam, was difficult and he had to learn how to fight and survive at a very young age. His ability to be vulnerable and self-reflective in combination with his impressive tough appearance made me want to learn more about him. When he told me he had a son in foster care, one he hadn’t been in touch with for several years, I knew I had to make a film about him.”

The action on screen, as Jacinto and Shakur share a pizza, play numerous games of chess or go shopping for sports clothing, is punctuated by split-screen telephone conversations between Jacinto and Alia. What’s more, each shot of the father/son sojourn to the coast is beautifully crafted, and delicious colour grading makes for a lustrous and cinematic finish.

“When I make a documentary I like to have a fiction film approach, when making a fiction film I like to have a documentary approach,” she says. “My fictional approach consists of a focus on form and choosing very carefully almost every shot. I’m often inspired by films I’ve seen. In the case of Father it was Stranger than Paradise (1984, Jim Jarmusch) for the strict camera positions and ‘blocky’ chapter by chapter editing, and Buffalo 66 (1998, Vincent Gallo) for its colour and playful style.”

Nick Cunningham

Buried in the past

Sergei Loznitsa

Sergei Loznitsa’s latest feature documentary State Funeral explores the cult of personality that surrounded Joseph Stalin by concentrating on the death of the great dictator in 1953, writes Geoffrey Macnab.

The Ukrainian filmmaker has drawn on footage, much of it never seen before, of Stalin’s funeral in 1953. He shows extraordinary scenes of mass grief in the Soviet Union prompted by the leader’s passing – scenes which seem all the more incongruous given the devastation Stalin wrought on his own people.

This is material with a very personal resonance for Loznitsa. “My family suffered during Stalin’s rule.

My mother’s family, a large Cossack family from the south of Russia, was almost entirely wiped out,” he recalls of how Stalin blighted his own life.

He tells an extraordinary story about his mother and her father. As he discovered, the father (his grand­ father) had been arrested and killed when his grandmother was pregnant. “His best friend [then]

proposed to my grandmother and offered her support and protection.

My mother grew up, thinking that he was her real father, and I have the fondest memories of this wonderful man, whom I also considered to be my real granddad,” Loznitsa recalls.

The true story was only revealed by the grandmother days before her death. “The fear was so strong that until her dying day my grandmother was afraid to mention the name of her first, dearly beloved husband, and the father of her eldest daughter.” What makes the story all the more chilling is Loznitsa’s observation that this was just “a rather typical saga of an ordinary Soviet family.” It wasn’t much different from what so many others had in Russia also experienced under Stalin.

The footage used in State Funeral comes from the Russian State Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow. Loznitsa had already successfully co-operated with the archive while making last year’s The Trial, which likewise screened in Venice. His initial idea was to present the history of Soviet state funerals – from Lenin to Stalin, including the footage of the funerals of the Bolshevik elite – Kirov, Dzerzhinsky etc, some of whom were murdered by Stalin, as he saw them as potential threat to his rule.

However, when Loznitsa was discussing this idea during IDFA 2018 with the deputy head of the

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Krasnogorsk Archive (which was attending IDFA to present the reconstruction of Dziga Vertov’s first film The Anniversary of the Revolution) she told him that they had 300 reels of footage of Stalin’s funeral. Loznitsa’s ear pricked up.

He was fascinated and asked his assistant in Moscow to focus only on these reels. “We ended up with fantastic, very well preserved (because nobody ever used it) material, mostly in colour, which is very rare for the Soviet documentary of the 50s.”

State Funeral is a companion piece to The Trial. The director describes the films as the first two parts of what may eventually turn into a trilogy. His aim, he says, is “to conduct a fundamental study of the Soviet regime – and these two films touch upon the foundations of Stalinism.”

To Loznitsa’s dismay, the cult of Stalin lives on. As he points out, “the contemporary Russian regime sees Stalinism as its ideal model, so it’s hardly surprising that the authorities encourage this revival.

They’ve started putting up monu­ ments to Stalin and they praise him as an “efficient manager” and the winner of the Second World War. Nobody seems to mention that before he won it, he actually started it – together with Hitler.”

Statistically, Loznitsa continues, “Stalin killed more people than Hitler. And he certainly killed many more Russians than Hitler did.”

Venice Out of Competition, TIFF Wavelengths

State Funeral

Sergei Loznitsa

Venice Film Festival

Toronto International Film Festival 2019

“We ended up with fantastic, very well preserved material, mostly in colour�

State Funeral

Director & script: Sergei Loznitsa Production: ATOMS & VOID (NL) Co-production: Studio Uljana Kim (LT)

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Closing the gap Five new projects with strong Dutch interest were presented at the Venice Gap-Financing Market in 2019. Nick Cunningham reports.

The Miracle of Almerìa Director: Moon Blaisse Scriptwriters: Moon Blaisse and Thomas Bellinck Production: Cassette for Timescapes (BE) Co-production: Baldr Film (NL)

Moon Blaisse

Brussels-based Dutch filmmaker Moon Blaisse’s documentary The Miracle of Almería looks set to lift the lid on the tomato production industry operating in the southern Spanish province of the title, an area that is suffering the dire ecological consequences of plastics and pesticide (over)use. The logline reads how the legal and ‘illegalised’ inhabitants of Almería, the largest vegetable patch of Europe, collabor­ ate to reveal the system of violence behind the tomatoes we eat.

Close to full finance prior to Venice, with €80,000 left to find of the €840,000 budget, the film is a Belgian-Dutch co-production between Cassette for Timescapes (Belgium) and Baldr Film (NL).

Dutch elements within the production include the work of composer Jens Bouttery and the sound design of Evelien van der Molen and Michel Schöpping.

Dutch DOP Emo Weemhoff has also been drafted in, together with historian Leonor Alvarez Francès, who teaches at the University of Leiden.

Producer Emmy Oost points out that she is also in search of an international co-producer that can help with post-production funding. “And we would love to work with an international team

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in the editing room, adding a very experienced editing consultant from France, Germany or Italy.

We are also looking for distributors, especially in Spain and Italy where “illegalised” people work in slave-like conditions on the vegetable fields, but also in the rest of Europe as we all consume the vegetables produced in Almería.”

“I am determined to use film to show things that otherwise stay invisible,” explains director Blaisse.

“A lot of the problems that we face today are very hard to describe in an anecdote, and film can be something that gives a deeper insight into these problems.

These can also be migration, oppression, climate change, [problems] which are all very much intertwined.”

Dutch projects at

Venice Gap-Financing Market 2019 The Hunter’s Son

Director & script: Ricky Rijneke Production: Rotterdam Films (NL) Co-production: Vintage Pictures (IS), Balapolis (PL), De Wereldvrede (BE)

Ricky Rijneke

Ricky Rijneke’s thriller/drama The Hunter’s Son is a Dutch/ Belgium/Poland/Iceland co-pro­ duction (plus Eurimages) budgeted at €2.6m with €2.4m already in place. In the film, a terrible and unexpected act forces a border

guard and his 14-year old son to face a crossroads in their lives.

“I think the film is really about the human psyche, like my previous film Silent Ones (2013, IFFR Tiger Award nominee), and that is something that really fascinates me, the inner world of characters,” comments Rijneke. “With this film I want to explore the [notion] of being a stranger and what it is like to become estranged. The setting of the film is not a concrete place but somewhere along the European border, but it is also set within a state of mind.”

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“I like to use cinematographic elements to make immersive cinema; cinema as an experience,” she adds.

Produced by Rotterdam Films, Rijneke is in pre-production right now ahead of a February/ March 2020 shoot and is heavily involved in casting and location finding. “I am looking for visually strong landscapes, which is why Iceland is prominent, which also reflect the inner world of the characters in the film. Raw locations, but at the same time poetic.”

Closing the gap Continued from page 9

The Last Ride of the Wolves Director: Alberto de Michele Scriptwriters: Alberto de Michele and Simone de Rita Production: Halal (NL) Co-production: Jolefilm (IT)

Alberto De Michele

The Last Ride of the Wolves is an audacious hybrid feature docu­ ment­ary in which artist/filmmaker Alberto De Michele follows his criminal father Pasquale and the eponymous Wolves on a final heist designed to secure their retirement pensions.

The Italian-spoken film is produced

by Amsterdam-based Halal with the support of the Film Fund. In Venice producer Gijs Kerbosch was looking to raise the remaining €270,000 of a €700,000 budget. His other reason for attendance was to secure Italian and international distribution partners.

“The film is set in Veneto, the region where the Wolves have operated for three generations.

They are the last of the craftsman thieves that exist in that part of Italy. The fun fair attractions is their cover and when the fog comes down, and during these months it

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does a lot, they go out and steal,” explains director De Michele.

“My father will play my father, I will play myself and the Wolves are going to be the real Wolves. We will get access to this world which is impossible to penetrate but which is bound to disappear. At the same time this film will give me a chance to give an account of where I am from and this crazy upbringing that my father gave me and which had a huge impact on my development as a person and also as an artist.

At the end it is also a personal tribute to the favourite antihero of my life, my father.”

“Perhaps he/she is just an AI gone rampant”

The Great Orator Director: Daniel Ernst Production: Submarine Channel

Daniel Ernst

Submarine Channel brought the Daniel Ernst AI-driven VR project The Great Orator to Venice to raise both its finance and its inter­ national profile. The concept is intriguing, with the log-line reading

how, within this story world, “a hysterical dictator madly spews his uninterrupted flow of absurdities to crowds of people that have been vaporized from their physical existence into the staged screen presence of enthusiastic followers.”

you don’t, the Orator is continuing with his oration and the characters in that world are doing their thing.

A person in China will be hearing exactly what you are hearing if you log in at the same time.”

He further points out how he and Submarine Channel are working with Leiden University in trying to incorporate AI and texted speech elements, with the result that the generated oration will be based on current affairs every time you log in.

“It is a perpetual world that goes on even if you are not there,” he underlines.

Ernst explains a little more.

“The Great Orator is not a linear story, nor is it a story with a beginning or an end. It is a place that exists somewhere in the virtual ether, and you can go there whenever you please. But even if

And who is the orator? “It is like a Wizard of Oz story where you don’t know who the wizard is but you know there is this big presence, but perhaps he or she doesn’t even exist and perhaps he/she is just an AI gone rampant. It’s a nice metaphor for AI and VR in general… you have to believe to make them real.”

Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis Aida is a Bosnia and Herzegovina production that currently boasts seven co-producers, the Dutch element being leading production house N279 Entertainment. Set in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War, the €4.3m production (€3.95m in place) tells of teacher Aida who, when forced to leave the UN safe zone, must selflessly plead with the Serbian army to guarantee the lives of her children.

Comments director Zbanic: “Our film is an intense and emotional one done from a feminist perspective. Its emotional intensity is a challenge: to give an account of a human tragedy, truthfully but without falling into a trap of sentimentality. Our aim is to draw those who refuse to deal with ‘difficult’ topics into the story which is European, but was seen as the story of others.

Until now.”

Quo Vadis Aida (working title) Director & script: Jasmila Žbanić Production: Deblokada (BA) Dutch co-producer: N279 Entertainment 21

A decade of change Doreen Boonekamp will be leaving the Netherlands Film Fund in October 2019 after ten years at the helm. She reflects on a decade of profound change across the Dutch and international industry with Nick Cunningham.

It wasn’t the easiest of starts.

Just as Doreen Boonekamp was taking over from Toine Berbers as head of the Film Fund in Autumn 2009 (she had previously headed up the Netherlands Film Festival for eight years), the world was experiencing financial meltdown.

The crisis had a huge impact on the audiovisual industries as it triggered a steep decline both in core cultural financing and also within the media budgets of the public broadcasters. Prestigious Dutch talent institutes like the Binger and Niaf were closed down, as was the Rotterdam Media Fund and later on the national Media Fund. The Netherlands Film Fund itself faced both a significant decrease in budget and an extension of its remit.

At the same time the global film industry saw the emergence of the enormous online services, which began to dominate the way content was made, distributed and viewed, in the process effecting huge shifts in the industry infrastructure.

It was obvious therefore that if there was to be ongoing meaningful investment within, and stimulation

of, the audiovisual landscape in the future, a change of both mindset and modus operandi was necessary.

“We needed to find new solutions immediately, so we shifted focus to greater international collaboration and to seek new partners both in the international industry, but also in the Netherlands, to support new and established talents,” Boonekamp explains. “We forged new partnerships with labs such as Torino and ACE, we devised several co-production treaties, such as with South Africa and China, the Frenchspeaking Belgian Community and Germany, and we designed new schemes for talent development within the Film Fund both with local and international partners.

By doing so, new possibilities were created for both established and emerging professionals not only to hone and improve their talent on the job but also through expert training.”

Encouraging results were not long coming. Yes, Dutch shorts, documentaries and youth films were already established brands and continued to thrive inter­ nationally, with A Single Life nominated for an Academy Award, and ongoing successes such as the documentaries Miss Kiet’s Children, Strike a Pose and A Family Affair and the fiction features Prince, Romy’s Salon, Fight Girl, Cobain and My Extraordinary Summer with Tess.

But then Dutch arthouse came into its own with the likes of Alex van

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Warmerdam’s Borgman competing for the Palme d’Or in Cannes 2013 (the first Dutch film to do so in 38 years) and the audacious ‘Dutch western’ Brimstone (Martin Koolhoven) selected for competition in Venice 2016, the first Dutch film to do so in 10 years.

2019 itself is proving a bumper year with significant firsts from distinctive female voices. Sacha Polak’s Dirty God was selected for Sundance Competition while Halina Reijn’s Instinct won the Variety Piazza Grande award in Locarno. In addition Ena Sendijarevic’s Take me Somewhere Nice won Best Film in Sarajevo.

Boonekamp also points out how selective funding in local films was counterpointed over this period with minority investment in a slew of successful international titles that included The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece), Zama (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina) and Girl (Lukas Dhont, Belgium).

“In order to increase skills levels among Dutch creatives and business professionals, as well as stimulate more releases across borders, we funded more Dutch majority productions while gaining a greater position as a minority partner,” Boonekamp underlines.

2014 was a true watershed year for the Dutch industry as two major initiatives were launched under the umbrella of the Film Fund.

The Netherlands Film Production Incentive (in 2017 widened to embrace high-end TV productions)

Outgoing Film Fund CEO

Doreen Boonekamp

© Bram Belloni

“The Production Incentive and the new Film Commission had a very transformative effect on the Dutch industry”

23

A decade of change Continued from page 23

Dirty God

offered cash rebates of up to 35% production spend in the Nether­ lands. The Netherlands Film Commission meanwhile, under the stewardship of Bas van der Ree, was created to show the world how beneficial shooting in the Netherlands could be.

“Both these instruments had a very transformative effect on the Dutch industry and boosted international collaboration, raised ambition levels within the sector and enabled Dutch professionals to team up not only with smaller productions but also with bigger, major pro­ ductions coming to shoot in the Netherlands such as Dunkirk (2017) and The Goldfinch which worldpremiered at Toronto 2019.

Boonekamp also highlights the enormous strides taken in the

stimulation of, and investment in, the Dutch animation industry.

Ten years ago, Dutch cartoons were something of an afterthought, despite an admirable tradition in the short form (three Academy Awards for Best Animated short since 1977). But feature production seemed dead and buried. That is no more the case, as evidenced by the boom in feature production over the past decade and Cartoon Movie’s celebration of the Dutch animation industry in Bordeaux in March at which nine feature projects in development were presented from the likes of Submarine, BosBros and Lemming Film.

“The Incentive gave this part of the industry an additional boost, even more so when we opened up the scheme for high-end series,” claims Boonekamp. “One example is

24

Sacha Polak

Undone made with Amazon, produced by Submarine and directed by Hisko Hulsing, using strong Dutch talent. The Incentive also enabled the industry to construct additional animation studios because there are a lot more international productions on the way. This specific part of the industry sees a lot of international talents collaborating on series and features. It is great that the Dutch, in such a short period of time, have quickly become part of the international animation community.”

While the Netherlands continues to strengthen its international position there is the perennial problem of retaining local cinema audiences for locally produced content, in the face of online domination. Which is why

Doreen Boonekamp A Single Life

Job, Joris & Marieke

additional policy steps were taken by the Fund in 2017 to allocate substantially more budget for development (the figure in 2019 was three times that of 2013) and also to increase the amount of grant per project to counter continuing decreases in contributions from private sources.

Boonekamp is delighted that the government recently set aside funding to build a network of film education hubs, and to further invest in talent development, innovation and inter­national­ isation. “To invest in both future audiences and in talents is highly important – and this all starts with film education which was something very much lacking in the Netherlands. The film community should also aim for a Creative Talent & Skills Lab that would play an important role in guaranteeing top quality output in the future, which could be developed through close collaboration between the existing Fund-supported festival talent labs and training programmes such as ACE, as well as with leading associations and trade bodies.”

Looking to the future, Boonekamp calls for the development of “a new eco system” to enable the independent screen industries in the Netherlands and across borders to grow, to shine and to connect to audiences across all platforms. “It is of upmost importance that cinema remains prioritised as an art form.

The fast changing landscape

animators, designers, DOPs, editors, composers, cast and crew.

I am very grateful for their commitment, the collaboration with all those distributing, selling and exploiting films and the continuous support of the festivals, markets, talent labs, archives, our colleagues in the EFADs, Cine Regio and BPX, and not least the whole team of the Netherlands Film Fund.” demands a new framework at a national level which includes a sophisticated and integrated film and media policy as well as the enforcement of circularity within the value chain through levies and investment obligations (including sustainable regulation on piracy and the fair remuneration of authors).”

“With the upcoming Audiovisual Media Service Directive in mind (whereby on demand services provide at least 30% of European content in their catalogues) there is a challenge to make sure this tool is implemented in Dutch law in such a way that it helps to boost the quality of Dutch content and its prominence within this 30%,” she adds.

Looking back, Boonekamp pays tribute to the film community both home and abroad, “It has been a tremendously fascinating and inspiring period of time. For sure nothing could have been achieved, nor will we be in future, without the energy, dreams and creative vision of our writers, directors, producers,

25

“The work of a fund is never done,” Boonekamp concludes. “I knew this when I started off and I am very happy that Bero Beyer is taking over

“You have to invest in future audiences and talents – and this all starts with film education” this position, and confident that together with the team he will guide the Dutch film industry through the coming years with all the new and as yet unknown challenges that will have to be faced. One of the characteristics of the film industry is that it is always changing. It is over a hundred years old but it is still a young art form and in a state of flux. This is what funds and governments must always keep foremost in mind, to remain clearly focussed on domestic and inter­ national concerns, but at the same time to offer both continuity and long term sustainable policies.”

Role reversal It was amazing. Since then, I couldn’t stop. I just kept doing it.”

Sverre Fredriksen

Imagine a world in which humans are the pampered pets, mollycoddled and being taken to the vet by their animal owners.

This is the premise behind Human Nature, the latest animated short from Sverre Fredriksen and co-creator Zaou Vaughan, which world-premiered at TIFF 2019.

Human Nature is a funny, lyrical and sometimes grotesque affair in which we see babies lapping up food from beneath the bin in the kitchen, naked old men licking their genitals in the living room and hand-made puppets of women with huge, drooping breasts.

Director Fredriksen, the moving force behind the project, is one of the most adventurous young talents in Dutch animation, even if he happens to be Norwegian – he grew up in the countryside an hour or so outside Oslo. “I just had nature around me and so I was free to explore,” he remembers. He further recalls how, as an 8-year-old, “I was able to animate my toys and that just blew my mind. My dinosaurs could eat the lego… Bottles of ketchup could be squirting blood.

When he couldn’t get into his college of choice in Norway, Fredriksen headed down under to study animation at the University of South Australia instead. While his fellow students were experimenting with the brand new digital cameras, Fredriksen was tinkering with the remnants of old film stock and Bolex cameras in the school’s possession as a result of its deal with Kodak. “Of course, for animation, that is perfect. I was just happy to be able to play with analogue film.”

After he finished studying, Fredriksen stopped off in the Netherlands on his way back home to Norway. He didn’t intend to stay but when he was given the opportunity to work at Submarine, the innovative production company run by Bruno Felix and Femke Wolting, as an animator on a series, he changed his mind. Ten years on, he is still in Amsterdam. “I have a permanent visa so I can stay and right now, I have an apartment and I have a Dutch girlfriend and we just got a child together,” he explains how he has put roots down in the Netherlands.

Human Nature was Fredriksen’s idea. The film, supported through Film Fund’s annual Ultrakort Scheme for animated shorts programmed theatrically before blockbusters, may be only two minutes long but this was still a very ambitious endeavour that he

26

couldn’t accomplish on his own.

It took six months to complete and the puppets were all hand sewn.

The filmmaker recruited Britt Snel to collaborate on the screenplay as well as Zaou Vaughan who had had assisted him in the past on commercial projects.

In spite of its scenes of humans at their most bestial, the allegory is understated. “I didn’t want to point any fingers. I just wanted (audiences) to look in the mirror

“I wanted audiences to look in the mirror and reverse roles” and reverse roles. People can take whatever they want from it.” Instead of a person having an apartment full of cats, the film shows cats with apartments full of humans.

The director acknowledges British animator Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit) as one of his inspirations.

The film is intended to be humorous and whimsical. It is made with a “cute and fluffy” technique even if some of the resulting content is disturbing. “The puppets are all made of wool and soft fabric… but then the images are quite grotesque. That is very appealing, to play with this contradiction visually,” he reflects on a film which will enrapture viewers one moment and make them squirm the next.

Geoffrey Macnab

Sverre Fredriksen

Toronto International Film Festival 2019

Š Family Affair Films

Human Nature

Short Cuts Competition

Human Nature Director: Sverre Fredriksen Scriptwriter: Britt Snel Production: Family Affair Films Floor Onrust, Noortje Wilschut, Chris Stenger Sales: SND Films 27

Contemporary World Cinema

Toronto International Film Festival 2019

The Barefoot Emperor Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens

“Everything was completely strange but in a fantastic way�

The Barefoot Emperor Director: Jessica Woodworth & Peter Brosens Production: Bo Films (BE) Co-production: Topkapi Films (NL) - Frans van Gestel, Arnold Heslenfeld, Laurette Schillings. Wajnbrosse (BE), Propeler Film (HR), Art Fest (BU) Sales: Be for Films 28

Return of the king

Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens had no intention of following up on their 2016 feature King of the Belgians. But they did, and now The Barefoot Emperor is selected for TIFF 2019.

Marvel and Disney may turn out sequels by the barrowload, but in the world of “delicate art house” cinema they are rare. “A sequel – it is dangerous territory because the singularity of each film has to be honoured and sequels tend to try to capitalise on something and to profit. That is very far from our palette of intentions… It didn’t occur to us” says Woodworth.

Back in 2016 King of the Belgians, a satirical comedy/road movie, imagined the Belgian king travelling abroad when Wallonia (the French part of Belgium) declares independence. With a dogged British journalist in tow, the fictional Nicolas III (Peter Van den Begin) tries to make his way home – but it proves a very fraught journey.

Woodworth and Brosens had shot a scene in Bulgaria during the making of King of the Belgians in which the king was shot down by a Belgian

sniper in chaotic circumstances similar to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 – the event that sparked The First World War. In the end, the scene, the most complex moment in the movie, didn’t make it into the final edit. Nevertheless, it helped inspire The Barefoot Empire (a Flemish/Dutch co-pro supported by the Netherlands Film Fund).

A few days before the filmmakers headed off to Venice for the world premiere of King of the Belgians, the directors went for an impromptu holiday to Istria, in Croatia. They were staying in the industrial port town of Rijeka where they noticed a big, rusty ship. They asked the waiter if they were allowed to go aboard this vessel. No, they were told. This was the old Yugoslavian dictator Tito’s ship and access was forbidden. However, the waiter suggested they visit Tito’s island instead. The idea immediately appealed. “We are both obsessed with dictators of all types,” Woodworth says. “They write history, and we are surrounded by so many pompous fools right now.”

The duo set off to the Brijuni islands. This was where President Tito spent his summers and it was full of eerie, often bizarre reminders of when he ruled the Balkans, for example an elephant that was presented to Tito by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s – and is still just about alive at the venerable age of 53. “Everything was completely strange but in a

29

fantastic way,” Woodworth recalls.

She and Brosens began to think it might be worth making a second film about the Belgian king – one set in a sanatorium on Tito’s island where the fragile monarch is recover­ ing from a gunshot to the ear.

When they told the lead actors back in 2016 of their plans to resurrect the king, the actors reacted with dismay, telling them it was a terrible idea. Nonetheless, King of the Belgians received such an enthusiastic response in Venice and on the festival circuit that they soon changed their minds.

The new film is about more than just the king. It touches on the rise of nationalism (reflecting the recent gains of the far right Vlaams Belang in the Belgian elections) and the social and political fissures in modern day Europe. If King of the Belgians was about a road trip, its successor (says Woodworth) is “a trippy thing without a road.”

King of the Belgians received huge enthusiasm on the festival circuit.

Bizarrely, no Belgian distributor would release it. Brosens and Woodworth therefore did the job themselves. Thankfully, local distributors seem far keener on The Barefoot Emperor, which will be released by Lumiere in February 2020.

The next 6 months will be spent pre­ paring the local launch. “We really want to bring it outside the cinephile circuit and into institutions and schools. We want to nourish dialogue. That’s the whole point!”

Camera, lights, A’dam Hot on the heels of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), the new $40 million Warner Bros/Amazon Studios drama The Goldfinch, starring Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman, is the second major Hollywood film to shoot in the Netherlands in recent years.

Whereas Dunkirk used the huge fresh water lake the IJsselmeer, The Goldfinch, by contrast, was shot in the heart of Amsterdam, where the production spent a week.

“Amsterdam is an incredibly cinematic city,” Mari Jo Winkler, executive producer of the film, says of the decision to come to Holland.

“We very quickly got a grasp of the rebate system. Bas van der Ree (Netherlands Film Commissioner) helped walk us through that and our local line producer Erwin Godschalk is a seasoned professional.”

“They were happy with the work we did on Dunkirk and so they approach­ed us again,” adds Maarten Swart, MD Kaap Holland Film, the Dutch co-producer on both projects, on Warner Bros decision to return to Holland.

Picturesque it may be but Amster­ dam has narrow streets, listed buildings and lots of canals, and its lay-out could have presented a daunting challenge to the film­ makers. “America is built for cars and when Amsterdam was built there were no cars,” Godschalk sums up the situation in a nutshell.

The Americans couldn’t have big

trailers and trucks. However, once they became used to working on a smaller scale, they rose to the challenge.

Production Incentive support on the film amounted to €435,013. What’s more, both Winkler and Swart are

Winkler and Swart are full of praise for the ‘pragmatism’ and ‘flexibility’ of Film Commissioner Bas van der Ree full of praise for the Netherlands Film Commission and for the “pragmatism” and “flexibility” of the indefatigable commissioner Van der Ree. “Bas is always doing a terrific job bringing people into Holland and (then) once they are there, giving them extra attention,” Swart agrees.

The Goldfinch is shot by legendary cinematographer, Roger Deakins, an Oscar winner for Blade Runner 2049 and whose other credits include No Country for Old Men and Barton Fink. As his Dutch collaborators quickly discovered, Deakins is an arch-perfectionist.

At his request, all the low wattage bulbs on a bridge over one of the canals where The Goldfinch was shooting were replaced so that the light would be brighter and more dramatic.

30

Godschalk provided The Goldfinch with local technicians, among them art department staff and set decorators to work under revered art director K.K. Barrett (Marie Antoinette, Her). One difference he noticed was that the Americans tended to be very specialised in their jobs whereas the Dutch would generally expect to take on many more tasks. Nonetheless, the Dutch and their American counterparts worked well together.

Furthermore, Godschalk made sure to consult City Hall and to make sure that the production didn’t antagonise the residents of Amsterdam, who sometimes become frustrated at the huge amount of tourists clogging up the city. When they were shooting a scene with fake snow early in the morning on the Reguliersgracht, one of Amster­dam’s most beautiful canals, some locals made mild grumbles – but an advantage of a big production like The Goldfinch is that the filmmakers could afford to address their complaints directly rather than let a dispute develop.

After Dunkirk and The Goldfinch, it is expected that the Americans will soon be back again. “What I saw is that they really enjoyed working here. They now see Holland and Amsterdam as an opportunity to shoot… I think they experienced that it will work out here. If there is some­thing that can be done in Holland, they will absolutely consider it,” Godschalk concludes.

Geoffrey Macnab

Shooting The Goldfinch in Amsterdam

Toronto International Film Festival 2019

© 2019 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved.

“Amsterdam is an incredibly cinematic city”

The Goldfinch Director: John Crowley Scriptwriters: Peter Straughan, Donna Tartt (based on the novel by) Producer: Color Force (US), Warner Bros (US), Amazon Studios (US) Co-producer: Kaap Holland Film (NL) Sales: Warner Bros Pictures 31

So long, farewell…

In October 2019 Marten Rabarts will be leaving Eye, where he has run the International department for the past four years, to become Artistic Director of the New Zealand International Film Festival.

He talks to Nick Cunningham.

© Yvonne Witte

When Marten Rabarts took over the running of Eye International in 2015 the Dutch film industry had returned to (welcome) good health.

The previous year had seen the successful and popular introduction of both the Production Incentive and the Netherlands Film Commission, and two years prior to that a Dutch film was selected for Cannes competition for the first time in almost 40 years (Borgman). What’s more, judicious selective funding and wise co-production investments meant that Dutch productions were well represented at A-festivals in both majority and minority capacities.

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But in terms of promotion, there was a lot to do to keep up with developments in finance and production. Rabarts decided therefore to up the ante in terms of branding and to place Dutch cinema within the country’s wider artistic tradition in key markets like Cannes and Berlin. For example In 2017 the Dutch pavilion in Cannes (renamed the See NL pavilion in order to ensure brand continuity across all promotion) was trans­ formed by rising design star Sabine Marcelis into a 3D homage to the 100th anniversary of the birth of De Stijl, the radical art movement

Eye International

Marten Rabarts departs to head up NZ Int’l Film Fest led by Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg. Likewise in 2019, to acknowledge 350 years since the passing of Rembrandt, Dutch professionals could meet and greet beneath splendid reproductions of the Dutch master’s works.

“We made some really big steps, made possible by the collaboration of the Film Fund, but also support from Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut - Architecture, Design & Digital Culture, and further afield we enlisted our Dutch embassies and consulates as key partners for these new ventures.”

Rabarts worked closely with both established and emerging talent during his 4-year tenure.

“Continuing to throw the spotlight on established Dutch talent such as Alex van Warmerdam, Heddy Honigmann, David Verbeek, Nanouk Leopold, Esther Rots, and Sacha Polak among others. Dealing with them individually and tailoring platforms for their new works was a pleasure and an honour to be part of,” he stresses. He reserves special comment for the Dutch Academy Award submission Layla M by Mijke de Jong (2016). “That particular film fed right into an urgent and current discourse on radicalisation. I was very proud to present it to the Academy as our Dutch Oscar sub­ mission that year but then it was also screened for members of the UN Security Council in Washington DC who were deeply interested in the content, and gained a unique insight into how and why kids can be radicalised.”

In terms of a strong flow of great new Dutch talents, Rabarts cites Ena Sendijarević (Take Me Somewhere Nice, Cannes ACID 2019), Aboozar Amini (Kabul City in the Wind, IDFA 2018) Sam de Jong (Prince & Goldie, Berlin Generation 2015/2019), Morgan Knibbe (Those Who Feel the Fire Burning, IDFA 2014), Steven Wouterlood (My Extraordinary Summer with Tess, Berlin Generation 2019) and most recently Halina Reijn whose debut Instinct won the Variety Grande Piazza award at Locarno 2019. “I was proud to help position a film like Instinct with the kind of festival roll-out it deserves; Locarno, Toronto and London, with still more to come; taking content which is challenging and controversial and placing it in a high-profile, serious artistic framework.”

stories that our filmmakers are telling and start tracking new talent from their short films onwards.”

So how will Rabarts be looking to dovetail the Dutch and New Zealand film communities when he takes up his new role? “I expect to see a stronger industry presence at the film festival in the coming years, and being such brilliant co-producers I’d hope to soon see Dutch producers in New Zealand exploring the opportunities to make films there just as they do in Brazil, Argentina or South Africa.”

“And of course every year I will be looking very closely at new films from the Dutch film community which I will be looking to programme – without question.”

A core desire of Rabarts was to deliver increasing numbers of global cinema’s most important programmers to The Netherlands.

Festival Directors and programmers from Sundance, Cannes, Locarno, San Sebastian, London, Toronto, Shanghai, Mumbai and MoMA have all added The Netherlands to their travel calendar. “It is more than just screening a thoughtful curation of films for them in a comfortable cinema, but having them spend time with Dutch filmmakers within their communities and getting to know this country. It is essential that the works are not presented in isolation just as a piece of cinema, but that international programmers understand the context for the Layla M.

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Mijke de Jong

Trigger happy alternative husband for her and father for them, to whom each responds warmly.

Joost van Hezik

Joost van Hezik’s tragi-comic psycho-noir Boy Meets Gun world-premieres at Busan 2019.

Take one Darwinian biologist suffering a midlife crisis, two feckless wannabe hoodlums, an oppressive father looking for an Oedipal comeuppance, a deluge of animal metaphor and a steely narrator whose identity is unclear right to the end, then throw in a heap of sex and violence, and as many plot twists as your nerves can bear, and you get Boy Meets Gun, a brilliantly crafted psychological roller-coaster that offers thrills, spills and myriad surprises throughout its 85-minute duration.

After a short prologue that introduces us to small-town teenage wastrels Donny and Richard, who are obviously planning some kind of mischief, we meet Maarten Moreau, a biologist bored of his own existence and, for all intents and purposes, invisible to the world.

His wife, a research scientist who breeds mutant pet mice with human ears on their backs, is calm but disdainful, while his children barely acknowledge his existence.

He continually imagines an

One day Maarten walks into a supermarket where he is held up at gunpoint. The ‘mischief’ that Donny and Richard were planning turns out to be a murderous heist.

During the resulting shoot-out a heavyweight .44 pistol ends up at Maarten’s feet, but he decides to keep it instead of handing it over to the police. Slowly but surely the gun exerts control over him. Instead of being cowardly, dull and pedestrian he is now brave, interesting and sexy, and he assumes an aura of impregnability. But the gun also renders him reckless, and eventually its owners decide they want it back, with tragic results…

Sorrentino, specifically citing Il Divo and The Consequences of Love.

“The camera work of Luca Bigazzi, I adore it.”

Music plays a vital role in the film as well, with Christiaan Verbeek’s string-laden score (oppres­s­ive, jarring, discomforting) providing auditory counterpoint to the action playing out on screen. Puccini’s Nessun Dorma underscores Maarten’s transformation to hero at the beginning of the film and accompanies his drive towards a final showdown.

Van Hezik worked closely on the very complex screenplay with screenwriter/director Willem Bosch, honing and ordering it over a period of four months. “It is a crime genre movie so you need to get all the plot points where they need to be,” the director underlines. “Also when directing, it’s about getting the facts straight and deciding who knows what, and when should we convey what knowledge to the viewer? That was a hard job.”

Just as important to proceedings is evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins (whose self-replicating meme theory, as expounded in The Selfish Gene, is referenced in the film), and evolutionary theory in general. The film abounds with animals living within unnatural habitats, whether large insects, iguanas, rare parrots in sub­ terranean captivity or lab mice under the care of Maarten’s wife. On the other hand, a key recurring meta­ phor in the film is a wild butterfly, itself a creature that undergoes profound transformation. (Early in the film Maarten explains how he believes he inhabits the dream of a butterfly).

The Coen Bros were an inspiration in the film’s realisation, Van Hezik points out, “as their films are on the one hand entertaining but also complex on a philosophical level.”

From a design perspective, the team looked to the work of Paolo

“I really like symbols and metaphors and I always have a philosophical or thematic approach to a story,” Van Hezik insists. “I always need to know what the story is about on a metaphysical level.”

Nick Cunningham

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Busan International Film Festival

Boy Meets Gun

Joost van Hezik

Slowly but surely the gun exerts control over him

Boy Meets Gun

Director: Joost van Hezik Scriptwriter: Willem Bosch Production: Pupkin (NL) - Pieter Kuijpers, Sander van Meurs, Iris Otten Co-production: VPRO (NL) Sales: Media Luna

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28 September - 1 October 2019

Holland Film Meeting

Dutch producers will reach the international buyers in a novel way, through their stomachs‌ Rianne Poodt

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Return of HFM! Geoffrey Macnab previews the yearly Netherlands Film Festival interface between the Dutch production industry and the international co-pro, sales and distribution sectors.

The Holland Film Meeting is back – and it means business. Called “a four day whirlwind” by its organisers, the revamped event includes one of the most important international exchange markets in Europe (the event where Sacha Polak’s Sundance entry Dirty God was first hatched) as well as meetings, networking events, debates and trail-blazing master­ classes.

As Rianne Poodt, Head of NFF Professionals & Talent & Education, points out, Utrecht is one of the few events on the industry calendar where you can do business on a barge. The HFM “Boat Sessions” allow delegates to discuss sales and distribution strategy while also being given a guided tour by water of one of the most beautiful cities in the Netherlands.

“During an experience like this, people are more open to communication,” Poodt says of the combination of business, net­ working and sightseeing. “It’s an example of what makes the HFM stand out from other international film markets: intimate and down-toearth, it makes for an excellent platform to forge new bonds for future collaborations, without the hullabaloo of a global competition.”

This year, Dutch producers are trying to reach the international buyers and financiers in another novel way, through their… stomachs.

The producers will serve up a smorgasbord of delicious cuisine for 100 of their guests in a restaurant adjacent to the canal. “It’s right in line with the festival’s overall theme this year of Homo Ludens, reminding us that film­making is not just a business, but a tremendous opportunity for creativity, experimentation, and play.”

One measure of the attraction of the Holland Film Meeting is the number of leading sales agents and distributors from Europe and the US who attend. This year, TrustNordisk, XYZ Films, ARRI, Anonymous Content, Film4 and Universal International are all on the guest list. They will eagerly explore what their Dutch colleagues have to offer in terms of feature fiction and documentary films and, for the first time, interactive and VR projects.

Rotterdam (IFFR) in January.

These projects will secure finance through the festivals and then, if they are lucky, screen as part of their programmes. For example, Isabel Lamberti’s latest project El azul bajo sus pies, produced through IJswater Films, was in BoostNL last year, and will follow up this year at HFM with a preview for inter­national sales and distribution professionals.

Poodt and her team have put together a strong programme of masterclasses. These include Fiona Crombie, the production designer for The Favourite; Andy Hill, the music supervisor on The Lion King, and Michael Engler, the director of new British costume picture Downton Abbey. Also, as part of a long-standing collaboration with the Netherlands Society of Cinema Editors (NCE), HFM will host the annual NCE Masterclass with Lee Smith, the Oscar-winning editor of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.

The industry event Be Dramatic! will present international delegates with a sneak-preview of Undone, the new adult animated “dramedy” from innovative Amsterdam-based pro­ duction outfit Submarine, and Heirs of the Night, Diederik van Rooijen’s ghoulish new vampire drama produced through Lemming Films.

There will also be a talk during the conference day on VOD platforms which will see heated discussions of such issues as the digital single market. Janneke Sloetjes, Netflix director for European Public Policy, is among the confirmed speakers for this as well as EUROVOD delegate Silva Cibien and LACINETEK’s Jean-Baptiste Viaud.

Thanks to the BoostNL programme launched in Utrecht in 2016, Dutch filmmakers can develop their projects at HFM and then take them on to International Film Festival

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of the Netherlands Film Festival, and it’s a fair bet that the Holland Film Meeting will be at the right at the centre of birthday celebrations.

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The kids are alright Nienke Poelsma

Cinekid is among the world’s biggest and buzziest film, TV and media events for kids – and has also become a key destination for executives producing and commissioning content for young audiences.

Nienke Poelsma, Head of Cinekid for Professionals, is well placed to comment on shifting trends within children media in the Netherlands and beyond.

Among changes Poelsma has noticed is a new emphasis on animation and a move away from the big screen. The Junior Co-Pro­ duction Market, the two day Cinekid event at which new projects are pitched, bought and sold, is receiving more and more animated films and series.

Some of the Netherlands’ top pro­ duction companies are presenting new projects. For example Submarine, the Amsterdam and LA-based company run by Bruno Felix and Femke Wolting, is unveiling its new TV pre-school project Pol The Pirate Mouse.

Scripted by Tingue Dongelmans, this is an animated yarn based on a graphic novel about Pol the pirate,

a city mouse who ventures into the wilds aboard her pirate’s nest.

Meanwhile, Marleen Slot’s Viking Film (the outfit behind Sundance selection Dirty God) is partnering again with Swedish outfit Snowcloud on Mini-Zlatan and Uncle Darling, a live action kids’ film looking at same sex marriage.

From further afield, Quebec-based 10th Avenue Productions is presenting its latest animated project Beluga Blues, scripted by Andrée Lambert. Belgian animation outfit Lunamine has a new animated project, The Only Child, an adaptation of a bestselling book which it is making as a co-production with China.

For the first time, Cinekid is hosting a works in progress section, open to producers who have at least eight minutes of footage to show.

Through the new section, Submarine is presenting its modern day fairy tale Coppelia, which mixes animation and live action. Directed

by Jeff Tudor, Steven de Beul and Ben Tesseur, the project was previously in the Cinekid co-pro­ duction market. Another work in progress which also started life in the co-production market is ambitious Norwegian pre-school film Ella Bella Bingo, produced by Frank Mosvold of Kool Produktion and sold by Studio 100 Film.

Cinekid’s Industry Forum will ponder the way that kids communicate with adults and how adults should interact with kids.

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Among the executives who’ll be contributing to the discussion are Meredith Halpern-Ranzer of Wow in the World (one of the biggest podcasts for kids in the US), Joel Silverman from Kids Know Best in the UK, marketing guru Lily Yan from Nelvana/Corus Ent (Canada) and Shabnam Rezaei of Big Bad Boo Productions, Canada.

Unlike some other festivals which insist on nothing but premieres, Cinekid will invite films that have played elsewhere if there is a worthwhile reason for doing so.

For example, Geneviève DuludeDe Celles’ A Colony, winner of the Crystal Bear in Berlin’s Generation programme is screening and the director will be in town to discuss its themes, which include violence, bullying and discrimination among young teens.

For years, Dutch cinema audiences have loved their family films.

However, admissions for children’s movies are currently dipping, not just in the Netherlands but across Europe. Delegates will discuss new research looking at box office trends.

“I think Dutch children’s films are struggling. We had the glory days with Bos Bros and their beautiful productions,” Poelsma says.

Filmmakers, she suggests, don’t always take the children’s audience seriously. Cinekid will remind them that it is crucial that they do, and that they neglect the audience of the future at their peril.

Geoffrey Macnab

21 - 25 October 2019

Cinekid for professionals

Š Melanie Lemahieu

The Industry Forum will ponder the way kids communicate with adults and how adults should interact with kids

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Kaboom time for toons “You can see the scale of ambition among Dutch animation producers right now”

Aneta Ozorek

Undone (TV series) Director: Hisko Hulsing Production: The Tornante Company (US) Co-production: Submarine (NL) 40

9 - 17 November 2019, Utrecht & Amsterdam K ABO O M

Kaboom Animation Festival

The inaugural Kaboom Animation Festival kicks off November 9 in Utrecht before relocating to Amsterdam 5 days later. Artistic director Aneta Ozorek gets animated with Nick Cunningham.

It seems everything comes in pairs.

Two cities and two very specific focuses. Utrecht will present anima­ tions for kids and family audiences while the Amsterdam offer is adult and industry-oriented. Kaboom itself is the fusion of two former festivals, the KLIK Animation Festival and the Holland Animation Film festival, or the “love child” of the two, as the website puts it, adding how “we decided to join hands and work on our shared, progressive goal of a brand new animation festival that has it all… all the while celebrating the Dutch animation industry.”

That said, it has just one artistic director. And Aneta Ozorek describes the “one-stop shop” event as “the place to be for the latest and greatest in all thinks animated.”

What’s more it has piqued the singular interest of Dutch and international professionals alike, especially as Dutch animators are enjoying a purple patch, as evidenced by the acclaim for Netherlands output and talent during Cartoon Movie in March 2019.

The line-up is impressive and includes two shorts competition programmes (one for kids films, the other for adult-themed content), a focus on Aardman (that includes a

ANIMATION FESTIVAL

masterclass from the company’s co-founder David Sproxton), and an overview of the South Korean animation industry. Of enormous interest to local audiences and industry will be the festival’s presentation of 100 years of Dutch animation and a networking event that will enable all Dutch animation students to meet Dutch producers and funders. (For the record, HKU is one of Europe’s leading academies for animators and is housed in Utrecht, a city that has transformed itself over the past ten years into an essential European animation hub.)

individual countries with strong animation sectors and inviting them to network with Dutch producers and to invest in mutual collaboration.”

Episodes so far completed on Hisko Hulsing’s eagerly awaited Amazon series Undone, co-produced by powerhouse Submarine, will be screened in Amsterdam. Likewise, the company’s Where is Anne Frank?, directed by Ari Folman, will be presented as a work in progress.

“When you look at the Dutch industry ten years ago and then assess the catalogue of last year’s Cartoon Forum you see this incredible jump. This is unique.

With so many features currently in development, you can see the scale of ambition among Dutch animation producers right now.”

Ozorek stresses the next generation of burgeoning Dutch animation citing young talent such as Nienke Deutz, Wiep Teeuwisse, Jelle van Meerendonk, Jasper Kuipers, Aisha Madu and Iris Verhoeven.

“The festival believes that we have to invest strongly in the Dutch anima­tion industry. We will present, we will promote, we will organise all kinds of events to support them (Dutch producers and filmmakers), to facilitate collaborations, to create network events where new relation­ ships can be built,” she underlines.

“But also we have long term a perspective of focussing on

41

This will start with the Benelux, which she sees as a viable trading block whose animation sectors share similar creative and commer­ cial goals. In future editions she will turn the spotlight on the animation industries of Canada, Ireland and the Czech Republic and to examine the potential for collaboration with their Dutch counterparts.

Hailing originally from Poland, Ozorek has been very active for over 15 years in the Eastern Europe animation scene both as curator and promoter. She joined KLIK in February 2018 as Artistic Director.

One thing she bemoans is the Autumn silly season for Dutch festivals whereby Kaboom 2019 is squeezed between the Netherlands Film Fest in late September, Cinekid in late October and IDFA commencing in mid-November.

She confirms therefore that future Kaboom fests will take place in Spring, commencing 2021.

Eye on a Russian icon Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) is a towering figure in world cinema history, a director who worked within the Soviet system and yet turned out films that were mystical, mysterious and lyrical. Eye is celebrating his career this autumn with an exhibition which will highlight aspects of the Russian’s life and career that have never been properly explored before.

Putting together the exhibition has been a labour of love for Jaap Gulde­ mond, Director of Exhibitions/Chief Curator at Eye. For him, Tarkovsky is the perfect example of an auteur who exists in the field between cinema and visual art.

“Tarkovsky is one of the few figures who really tries to use the rules of cinema in his own way. For me, a lot of filmmakers use standard ways of making a film. Tarkovsky is the opposite. He really tries to use the means of making a film, the editing, the sound, the way he moves the camera according to his own rules,” Guldemond says of the director of such classics as Stalker and Solaris.

For years, Guldemond searched long and hard for the director’s heirs. There were several descend­ ants and colleagues of Tarkovsky still alive, among them an ex-wife, a sister and two sons. In the end, he discovered the person he was looking for, Andrey Tarkovsky Jr. Based in Florence, Italy, where his father had come late in his life to

work on his film Nostalgia, Tarkovsky Jr is a documentary maker himself and the ‘gatekeeper’ of the Andrei Tarkovsky archive. He is fiercely protective of his father’s legacy. It took Guldemond several years to track him down and win his confidence. However, with the son supporting the exhibition, the Eye curator has been able to access some extraordinary artefacts, among them Tarkovsky’s letters, scripts, his most intimate “scribbles” and drawings, and his collection of Polaroid photos. These aren’t just casual snaps. They are lyrical, haunting images which you can tell, the moment you see them, couldn’t have been taken by any­body else other than the Russian master.

Tarkovsy Jr lives in his father’s old apartment in Florence. Guldemond has visited him there. “It’s quite nice because when you step inside, it’s like you are (back) in Russia. Every­ thing is Russian. The furniture is Russian. There are Russian icons on the wall. There are presents from Sergei Parajanov,” he says of the flat which itself is like a mini museum.

In the 30 or so years since Tarkovsky died, he has been the subject of many retrospectives but never before has an exhibition as extensive as the one at Eye been mounted. This will be the first time that the early drafts of the scripts for Stalker and Andrei Rublev have been seen in public.

Visitors will also be able to see letters from the Soviet authorities to the director in which they make it

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very clear they are not pleased with the work he has been doing.

For Guldemond, the genius of Tarkovsky lay in his ability to create “poetic associations” between images. The Russian wasn’t much interested in narrative. His films were about feelings, not stories.

“It’s all about the meaning of life and the absence in our culture of room for a spiritual existence,” stresses the Chief Curator.

The exhibition will seek to recapture the spiritual force of his best work.

Guldemond has put up screens with very precisely selected fragments from Tarkovsky masterworks which will give viewers the feeling that they are walking through “the landscape” of his films.

Alongside Tarkovsky’s own work, which will be shown in restored versions, the film programme also includes movies from many directors inspired by Tarkovsky – or who inspired him. They include everything from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return to Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari, from Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia to Luis Bunuel’s Nazarin. The work of Tarkovsky’s father, the brilliant poet Arseny Tarkovsky, is likewise acknowledged.

Eye has already been receiving inquiries from other museums about being able to host the exhibition once its run in Amster­ dam is over. This is one Eye show which looks bound to travel.

Geoffrey Macnab

14 September - 6 December 2019

Eye Exhibition

Andrei Tarkovsky

Stalker

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Director & script: Andrei Tarkovsky

Rutger Hauer 1944 - 2019

© Rutger Hauer Starfish Association. Photographer: Joost van den Broek